Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, livre ebook

Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, whose title is inspired by Charles Taylor's magisterial A Secular Age, offers a host of expert analyses of the religious and theological threads running throughout Taylor’s oeuvre, illuminating further his approaches to morality, politics, history, and philosophy. Although the scope of Taylor’s insight into modern secularity has been widely recognized by his fellow social theorists and philosophers, Aspiring to Fullness focuses on Taylor's insights regarding questions of religious experience. It is with a view to such experience that the volume’s contributors consider and assess Taylor’s broad analysis of the limits and potentialities of the present age in regard to human fullness or fulfillment.

The essays in this volume address crucial questions about the function and significance of religious accounts of transcendence in Taylor’s overall philosophical project; the critical purchase and limitations of Taylor’s assessment of the centrality of codes and institutions in modern political ethics; the possibilities inherent in Taylor’s brand of post-Nietzschean theism; the significance and meaning of Taylor’s ambivalence about modern destiny; the possibility of a practical application of his insights within particular contemporary religious communities; and the overall implications of Taylor’s thought for theology and philosophy of religion. Although some commentators have referred to a recent religious “turn” in Taylor’s work, the contributors to Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age examine the ways in which transcendence functions, both explicitly and implicitly, in Taylor’s philosophical project as a whole.

The scope of Taylor’s insight into modern secularity has been ably recognized by his fellow social theorists and philosophers. The present volume aims to ensure that Taylor’s insights do not escape the notice, or indeed the scrutiny, of those thinkers more explicitly concerned with questions of religious experience in the modern era. Thus, Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age sets out to consider and assess Taylor’s broad analysis of the limits and potentialities of the present age in regard to human fullness or fulfillment. The crucial subsets of this consideration include questions about the function and significance of religious accounts of transcendence in Taylor’s broader philosophical project, the critical purchase and limitations of Taylor’s assessment of the centrality of codes and institutions in modern political ethics, the possibilities inherent in Taylor’s brand of postNietzschean theism, the significance and meaning of Taylor’s ambivalence about the modern destiny (openness or weakness), the possibility of a practical application of his insights among particular contemporary religious communities, and Taylor’s reticence to embrace apocalyptic or exilic voices in the contemporary debate about aspirations to fullness. A Secular Age contains the most explicitly theistic formulations in Taylor’s thought thus far, and while some commentators have therefore taken to speaking of a religious “turn” in Taylor’s recent work, the chapters in the present volume examine the ways in which transcendence functions, both explicitly and implicitly, in Taylor’s philosophical project as a whole. Special attention is also paid to his recent contributions to the study of secularization.

In A Secular Age, Taylor offers a lengthy consideration of processes of secularization that in certain respects have come to determine the character of the “North Atlantic world,” meaning they have come to determine how inhabitants of that world experience their proximity to and assuredness of fulfillment. For Taylor, the meaning of secularity is most distinguishable when we see it as “coterminous with the rise of a society [such as ours] in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option.” The wide availability of this particular option is therefore a necessary component of what Taylor means by secularity. Taylor describes how this novel situation came about, but he does not only describe. As he tells us, his expansive genealogy of the advent of this variety of secularity is meant to function also as a polemic against “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Much is implied in this claim. First, we can venture that the process of secularization and its connection to the appearance of the “exclusive humanist” option is surely contingent upon the collapse of an epistemology that Taylor least of all wants to reinstate. In other words, because we can no longer claim to “know” those teloi beyond the “immanent frame” of human flourishing, or at least cannot claim to know them in ways previously available—i.e., naïvely—it makes sense that the possibility of abandoning one’s commitment to those ends has arisen. Taylor is then of striking interest because he wants to polemicize not necessarily against “exclusive humanism” as such, but against the notion that such humanism is the destiny of a perfected humanity. Yet he wants to do this without reinvoking within his polemic the possibility of a new epistemological naïveté. In other words, Taylor wants to reinstate or retain the possibility of serious human commitments to “transcendent” ends without resorting to philosophical nostalgia. Taylor believes he can do this by giving a genealogy of our age that counters the proliferating arguments about the secure closure of the immanent frame, as well as those about the total convergence of pure immanence with human fullness.

Because Taylor’s entire project, from its very early stages, can be read as a negotiation of the conflict between the declining viability of foundationalist accounts of truth and the lingering problem of justifying human commitments, or at least access to “moral sources,” which he believes remain basic to any honest experience of personhood, the direction of his arsenal at the question of secularization is enormously suggestive. For example, if the practice of genealogy, which Taylor has adopted in works previous to A Secular Age, is shown in the latter to function in some sense as a defense of religiosity to claims of humanity’s “inevitable” immanentization, it may become impossible henceforward to read “religion” out of any of Taylor’s genealogical polemical efforts. The present volume takes up, among other things, this hint of a possibly pervasive religious concern in Taylor’s thought and works in various ways to show where we might or might not recognize it, as well as questioning and exploring the wider significance of such a concern.

Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age thus calls upon its contributors to take up in a focused way the role of religion in Taylor’s philosophy. The diversity of said contributors is noteworthy in its own right. Crossing disciplinary and geographical boundaries, as well as that between junior and senior scholars, the contributors have been selected in order to ensure a variety of angles of approach to Taylor’s work. Unsurprisingly then, Aspiring to Fullness contains the fire of its own internal conversation. As the reader will soon discover, this is not a simple compilation of self-contained and static pronouncements on Taylor. We hope the liveliness of the book’s trajectory is due at least in part to its deliberate structure, which places thematically related but often argumentatively opposed chapters in conversation with one another under five subheadings. Let us briefly introduce each section and individual chapter in order of appearance in the book.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1. Existential Theism

1. The Affirmation of Existential Life in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age by Justin D. Klassen

2. Transcendence, “Spin,” and the Jamesian Open Space by Paul D. Janz

Part 2. Ontology and Polemic

3. Transcendent Sources and the Dispossession of the Self by Carlos D. Colorado

4. Theorizing Secularity 3: Authenticity, Ontology, Fragilization by Ruth Abbey

Part 3. Middle Dwellers

5. Humanism and the Question of Fullness by William Schweiker

6. The “Drive to Reform” and Its Discontents by Charles Mathewes and Joshua Yates

Part 4. Ethics and Embodiment

7. The Authentic Individual in the Network of Agape by Jennifer A. Herdt

8. Enfleshment and the Time of Ethics: Taylor and Illich on the Parable of the Good Samaritan by Eric Gregory and Leah Hunt-Hendrix

Part 5\ . Outliers

9. Recovery of Meaning? A Critique of Charles Taylor’s Account of Modernity by Ian Angus

10. Transcendence and Immanence in a Subtler Language: The Presence of Dostoevsky in Charles Taylor’s Account of Secularity by Bruce K. Ward

List of Contributors

Index